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How 'these parts of twitter' splinters into sub-scenes as it grows

13 tweets · July 2022 · 254 likes · 5 retweets · read on Twitter

there is no single "this part of twitter" there never totally was but there's even less of one now however! there are THESE PARTS of twitter fluid, overlapping, playfully aiming towards earnestness, self-honesty, intentional cultural norms, & figuring out sovereignty

the main thing, from my perspective, is a self-awareness that we're creating the culture ourselves on here, and so we can make it serve us rather than just complaining about the birdsite 🦜

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

a self-fulfilling belief that twitter can be a place for conversations & connection

we needed a dense enough pocket in order to experience that together, which for awhile meant just a few thousand people, more or less central to the whole thing, and each with a wide variety of interests and approaches

we're now reaching a point where there are enough people around these parts that we can't all know each other! this mindtown is finally becoming a proper mindcity

and this means that pockets are starting to emerge, of clusters of people with different variations on roughly the same underlying cultural platform my pocket, ish:

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

what I want to see more of: - doing stuff - learning in public - global consciousness - meta, coordination - attention, awareness - 10y+ visions things that feel like clutter to me atm: - things I'd only care about via knowing the people - ingroup/tpot/tcot - blockchain minutiae

this is healthy & good we can grow even bigger we can iterate and experiment with various things we can create sub-scenes within the meta-scene, with different emphases and we can recognize each other from across this virtual giant room, by our earnestness and good reply game

and it's also sad! it's not unlike the end of high school, when many people go off to different cities and unis and certain situational friends become more distant acquaintances

ultimately, it's also simply inevitable scenes are constantly evolving, growing, splitting, and so on what we can aim for is to do so amicably and satisfyingly

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

one of the utterly fucking magical things about twitter, compared to something like facebook, is how it facilitates open scenes there's no group to join there's no admins there's no rules "these parts of twitter" is an observation of a phenomenon naturally in motion

great thread with some related and more graph-theoretical reflections

monk @mechanical_monk ·

imagine if you will the social graph of twitter interactions interactions = some reasonably weighted combination of replies, likes, RTs, QTs, DMs so twitter accts are the nodes, and the strength of the connection between 2 nodes is determined by how much they interact

exactly this you can't introduce your friends to tpot. you can introduce them to the scene around *you*, and ultimately they'll end up with a yet-distinct scene around them

Richard D. Bartlett @RichDecibels ·

@Malcolm_Ocean I think this is why I stopped using the acronym. its easy to mistake "tpot" for a bounded knowable group whereas "this part of twitter" is self evidently subjective and centerless

on the contrary, nobody can confer tpot membership on anybody else you can say you're part of this part of twitter, where "this part" is the part around you the best anyone else can do is say you're part of *that* part of twitter

Leah (Prime) 🦊 @leahprime ·

(N.b., Conferring tpot membership upon myself feels like self-identifying as a 'polymath': it's for other people to determine, not me. I digress.)

glorious thread that says everything I'm trying to say but better twitter.com/eigenrobot/sta…